The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,278 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 46% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 49% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 61
Highest review score: 100 Short Cuts
Lowest review score: 0 Gummo
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9,380 out of 20278
  2. Mixed: 8,434 out of 20278
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20278
20278 movie reviews
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  1. Isn't This a Time! A Tribute Concert for Harold Leventhal
    Watching the aging, but still spirited, singers come together to express their gratitude for the man who started their careers is often genuinely touching.
  2. Four Eyed Monsters
    This innovative chronicle of a truly modern romance also conveys, in a painful, darkly humorous way, a variety of ultra-identifiable truths, including the loneliness often suffered by big-city inhabitants and the complexities of sexual intimacy.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story
    The filmmakers have loftier goals, though, and in the end their existential tabloid style justifies itself. Abduction isn't about what happened, but about the painful introspection that is sparked by not knowing.
  4. Despicable Me
    Despicable Me cannot be faulted for lack of trying. If anything, it tries much too hard, stuffing great gobs of second-rate action, secondhand humor and warmed-over sentiment into every nook and cranny of its relentlessly busy 3-D frames.
  5. The Silence
    [Mr. Odar] allows the story to unfold at a deliberate pace, emphasizing the psychological nuances of the mystery rather than its procedural details, and using graceful wide-screen compositions and haunting sound design to create a compelling mood of menace, anxiety and sorrow.
  6. Following the Ninth: In the Footsteps of Beethoven's Final Symphony
    All the film’s segments are smartly assembled and gracefully paced.
  7. Master of the Universe
    Mr. Voss’s metaphors pile up helplessly: Finance is like being in the army, like catching a virus and as hard to grasp as quantum particles. The film in which he appears is a vertiginous look inside the bubble behind the financial bubble, with no end in sight.
  8. Salad Days
    An enlightening documentary.
  9. Doomsdays
    Wrapping an existential question in the random rhythms of the road movie, Doomsdays comes at you sideways, its melancholy catching you off guard.
  10. Donald Cried
    Donald Cried is an acutely insightful, exquisitely written and acted triumph for Mr. Avedisian, who understands how the past permanently clings to us.
  11. The Incredible Jessica James
    This is Ms. Williams’s movie, and she owns it.
  12. In the Intense Now
    Those dreading 50th-anniversary greatest-hits medleys will find solace, enlightenment and surprise in João Moreira Salles’s In the Intense Now, a bittersweet, ruminative documentary essay composed of footage from the era accompanied by thoughtful, disarmingly personal voice-over narration.
  13. VFW
    Essentially a geezers-fight-back siege movie (Tom Williamson plays the sole young veteran), VFW is riotously scuzzy and warmly partial to its rusty heroes.
  14. David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet
    The film’s grand achievement is that it positions its subject as a mediator between humans and the natural world. Life cycles on, and if we make the right choices, ruin can become regrowth.
  15. The Year of the Everlasting Storm
    The omnibus film The Year of the Everlasting Storm assembles pandemic-made shorts from around the globe. But with just two decent segments out of seven, this anthology uncannily replicates the sensation of feeling trapped.
  16. Scales
    Ameen prioritizes symbolism teeming with sensory spirit over plot-based narrative, which ultimately renders her attempt at making a political statement too opaque and disjointed to have much of an impact.
  17. Aloners
    Hong’s greatest strength is restraint. At every moment in which she could turn the film into an easier, feel-good story about a woman being taught how to wake up to life, she pulls back.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Angels in the Outfield
    Clarence Brown, who produced and directed, and Dorothy Kingsley and George Wells, the scenarists, were, it is apparent, not interested in facts. But they make convincing and thoroughly charming the legends they wish to purvey.
  19. Eileen
    Eileen is a mean movie, but I intend that as a compliment: There’s no lesson here, no revelation, no good vibes to wander away with. Spiky and cold, it’s a bitter holiday treat.
  20. The Shrouds
    A dry macabre humor has long run through Cronenberg’s work, and the uncertainty behind some of his intentions here creates thought-provoking ambiguity.
  21. Mogambo
    In the advancement of the romance, which itself is hot stuff, for what it is, several capable actors do entertaining jobs.
  22. Bunny
    Bunny is a New York movie that eschews realism but still brims with authentic affection, and in doing so, bursts with life.
  23. Kiss of Death
    It's a sleek, muscular thriller played by a terrific ensemble cast, directed by Barbet Schroeder with the somber acuity he has brought to subjects as diverse as Claus von Bulow ("Reversal of Fortune") and Gen. Idi Amin Dada.
  24. Great World of Sound
    I found Mr. Zobel’s film touching and amusing, but it also left me a bit queasy.
  25. The Kill Team
    Mr. Krauss might have served his material better if he had pulled the curtain back in The Kill Team, if only to explain why a movie that initially seems to be about one thing — as its shocker title suggests — is a partisan portrait of Specialist Winfield and his family.
  26. Sweet Virginia
    A twisty, small-town thriller that blooms in the shadows and shies from the light, “Sweet Virginia” marshals a relentlessly threatening mood from dangerous secrets and unpleasant surprises.
  27. The Double Hour
    The best movie of its kind since the French director Guillaume Canet's hit from 2006, "Tell No One."
  28. The Rainmaker
    Drawing a parade of colorful performances from a constantly surprising cast, the curiously titled ''John Grisham's 'The Rainmaker' '' is Mr. Coppola's best and sharpest film in years.
  29. Bobi Wine: The People's President
    The documentary’s raw material arguably could have yielded a more powerful fit with a tighter edit. Nevertheless, this is a mostly engaging portrait.
  30. 12
    With its thunderous drama and larger-than-life characters, which lend it a brawling energy, 12 is never dull.
  31. The Invisible Man
    Moss’s full-bore performance — anchored by her extraordinarily supple face — gives the movie its emotional stakes.
  32. The Batman
    I can’t say I had a good time, but I did end up somewhere I didn’t expect to be: looking forward to the next chapter.
  33. The Ice Storm
    Elegant and deeply disquieting drama.
  34. Arctic
    Arctic has the courage to avoid obvious payoffs.
  35. 48 Hrs.
    Walter Hill, the director of such beautiful but stilted tough guy movies as ''The Warriors'' and ''The Long Riders,'' has attempted something very different in 48 Hours a male-buddy action film that's positively witty and warm-hearted compared with his other work.
  36. Real Genius
    What the film needs, instead of these familiar teen-movie trappings, is a cleverness and eccentricity to match that of its characters. For the most part, these are qualities that it lacks.
  37. Definition Please
    More touching than riotous, Definition Please proves to be impressively nuanced once it begins revealing why Monica is so prickly around Sonny.
  38. Tuya's Marriage
    Mr. Wang and his screenwriting collaborator, Lu Wei (“Farewell My Concubine”), portray a world that, apart from its hardship, is thoroughly recognizable in its human complexity. Its characters are motivated by the same needs for companionship and material well-being and the same demons — greed, lust, jealousy and despair -- that drive everybody.
  39. Undefeated
    While Undefeated travels well-tilled inspirational ground, it's also an irresistible story of football, faith and the lust for happily-ever-after black-and-white endings.
  40. Stolen Seas
    A documentary that yearns to be an adventure movie, Stolen Seas can't resist drowning its invaluable insights in thundering, drum-heavy music and flashing visuals. Magnificent in its thoroughness and nuance, this dense, multifaceted study of Somali piracy really needs to settle down.
  41. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
    A sleek, swift and exciting adaptation of J. K. Rowling’s longest novel to date.
  42. Fed Up
    A whirlwind of talking heads, found footage, scary statistics and cartoonish graphics, the movie is a fast, coolly incensed investigation into why people are getting fatter.
  43. Smashed
    The degree to which Smashed refuses to indulge a voyeuristic taste for the kind of sordid details exploited by reality television amounts to an unspoken declaration of principle. In lieu of self-pity, Smashed substitutes tough love.
  44. Paradise Now
    Along the way, Paradise Now sustains a mood of breathless suspense. Politics aside, the movie is a superior thriller whose shrewdly inserted plot twists and emotional wrinkles are calculated to put your heart in your throat and keep it there.
  45. Superboys of Malegaon
    This tale — inspired by the 2008 documentary “Supermen of Malegaon” — succeeds most as a touching tribute to friendship.
  46. Cry, the Beloved Country
    Because movies have become so invested in the unleashing of violent emotion and the escalation of hostility, that expressions of restraint, reconciliation and forgiveness can easily be read as corny cop-outs. Cry, the Beloved Country is not corny, and it doesn't cop out.
  47. What Doesn't Kill You
    It tells a good story well, and in the process quietly says a little something about what it means to look at the American dream from the bottom up.
  48. Swimming
    Without exaggerating their lovability or condescending to their foolishness, Mr. Siegel makes vivid, likable people out of his three protagonists as they affect one another and are affected in turn.
  49. Manito
    Though a dramatic (even melodramatic) narrative eventually takes shape, what you remember is the succession of moods and observations through which it emerges.
  50. Secret Lives: Hidden Children and Their Rescuers During WWII
    Ms. Slesin sums up the complicated feelings of Secret Lives with one well-chosen phrase: what these people are suffering from, she says, is the "trauma of gratitude." Her film is as complex and moving as that formulation.
  51. Marion Bridge
    Remarkable for its seamless ensemble performances.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dead & Buried
    Fairly standard and cynical stuff, with enough threatening incidents to satisfy the most jaded horror-film buff.
  53. Exit 8
    Exit 8 is a pip and as fun to watch as it is to mull over.
  54. Tyrel
    The stranger Tyrel gets, the more accurate it feels. The ecosystem of behaviors and attitudes on display is so unnervingly sharp that some of us may well find ourselves wincing in recognition.
  55. Doin' It in the Park: Pick-Up Basketball, NYC
    Paced by Eddie Palmieri’s up-tempo, percussive score, “Doin’ It” bounces like a crossover dribble, gliding swiftly and surely through interviews, videos and history lessons, then transitioning to today’s dedicated ballers and playground culture.
  56. Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater
    The graceful flow avoids the spoon-feeding of pocket biographies, and even if the material can feel lean at times, Mr. Klinger shepherds along a valuable encounter with a sense of easy, generally uncanned observation.
  57. Waking Ned Devine
    Kirk Jones, who wrote and directed this blithe comedy, has been a prize-winning director of television commercials. And he has the knack of finding rubbery, expressive faces and letting each villager's quirks emerge on cue.
  58. Jess and Moss
    Mr. Jeter, who has made his feature-length debut with this film, tries to capture the loose feel of childhood's open-ended summers. But the vocabulary of his imagery feels worn out, and the ambience feels handed down.
  59. F/X
    The movie, which looks as if it had been made on an A-picture budget, has a lot of the zest one associates with special-effects-filled B-pictures.
  60. Land of the Dead
    One of the enormous pleasures of genre filmmaking is watching great directors push against form and predictability, as Mr. Romero does brilliantly in Land of the Dead. One thing is for sure: You won't go home hungry.
  61. Brooklyn 45
    Brooklyn 45 is overlong, repetitive and at times wearyingly stagy. The actors, though, can’t be faulted, convincingly turning unappetizing characters into broken people trying to move on from a war that keeps pulling them back in.
  62. Lake George
    It’s Coon’s charming performance of the eccentric victim-to-be that brings the film, written and directed by Jeffrey Reiner, into fuller focus as a crime comedy.
  63. Inspector Bellamy
    The ease and professionalism that distinguished this prolific director's later work is very much in evidence, as is an insouciant attitude, at once resigned and dismissive, toward mortality.
  64. The Boss of It All
    Like all of Mr. von Trier's films, The Boss of It All is a cold, misanthropic work that places no faith in institutions and in humanity itself. But it's also very funny.
  65. Will You Dance with Me?
    This is not a picture about which extravagant claims ought to be made; it really is, in the end, an hour and change in a London disco in 1984. But as a page from an artist’s notebook, and a time capsule curio, it rates pretty high.
  66. Bleak Moments
    The best that can be said for Bleak Moments is that it earns its name. The film, while it has been handsomely photographed, seems entirely given over to pained, wordless interludes. [23 Sep 1980, p.C6]
    • The New York Times
  67. That Darn Cat!
    The color is good and Bobby Darin warbles a song at the start that may be amusing to humans but would probably fill Felix with disgust. Anyhow, it's an entertaining picture.
  68. David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived
    “The Boy Who Lived” provides an unusual behind-the-scenes portrait of how life goes on after movies are made.
  69. Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted
    This fans-only documentary gets bogged down with dull asides.
  70. Sick of Myself
    Each time we think Signe has hit her breaking point, she perseveres. It’s deadpan funny at first, but then gets disturbing. Her refusal to give up the act proves to be more sickening than her physical symptoms.
  71. Mogul Mowgli
    With the director of photography (Annika Summerson) and the sound designer (Paul Davies), Tariq stitches domestic drama, satire and magical realism into a tissue of moods and meanings, held together by the shattering credibility of Ahmed’s performance.
  72. A Family Thing
    In A Family Thing, an earnest upbeat fable about the meaning of brotherhood in America, first-rate film acting infuses a contrived story with enough flesh, blood, wrinkles, warts and beads of sweat to make it intermittently surge to life.
  73. Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey
    The film, by Constance Marks, is a little light on details of Mr. Clash's personal life once he broke through, but otherwise this is a winning tale of the persistence and creativity behind one of the most famous and fuzziest faces in the world.
  74. Thirst Street
    Thematically shallow but stylistically rich, Thirst Street is best enjoyed with a hint of its heroine’s willfully superficial vision.
  75. Monument Ave.
    The dialogue and the ensemble acting maintain a near-perfect pitch.
  76. Untouchable
    A respectable and all-too-real introduction to a chilling chapter of a Hollywood horror story.
  77. The Imitation Game
    The Imitation Game is a highly conventional movie about a profoundly unusual man. This is not entirely a bad thing.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Smiley Face
    Despite its laid-back script, “Smiley Face” is as prankishly political as Mr. Araki’s “Doom Generation,” evincing a deep unease with the media-saturated capitalist nation that Jane crawls inside her bong to escape.
  79. Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price
    Makes its case with breathtaking force.
  80. London Road
    The artifice of the form works something wondrous with the material, highlighting the generic nature of our response to extreme violence.
  81. Her Majesty, Mrs. Brown
    Queen Victoria is played with splendid regal grace by Judi Dench.
  82. To the Limit
    This disorienting, dippy documentary makes one thing abundantly clear: for the Hubers, the toughest climb may be into their own heads.
  83. Leap Year
    Making sadomasochism appear less erotic than stamp collecting, Leap Year is a slow flare of emotional agony.
  84. This Is Elvis
    This isn't a particularly well-made film, or even a truthful one - as a matter of fact, its fraudulence is its one uncompromising aspect. And yet it is mesmerizing, if not as a drama or documentary, then as an artifact.
  85. Chasing Amy
    Smith's knowing humor and unruffled style make a good antidote to gender chaos. Music by David Pirner contributes to the film's loose, inviting mood.
  86. Married to the Mob
    Married to the Mob works best as a wildly overdecorated screwball farce.
  87. The Water Horse
    Ffamily-friendly escapist fare that should enthrall, without insult, fantasy-minded viewers of any age.
  88. A Monster with a Thousand Heads
    A Monster With a Thousand Heads will make your blood boil.
  89. Sisters in Law
    When the right thing is done, it is uplifting in any context. Sisters in Law positively soars.
  90. Maria by Callas
    The movie is to Callas what last year’s “Jane” was to Jane Goodall: A documentary that revitalizes history through primary sources, to illuminating, at times enthralling effect.
  91. Beetlejuice
    Elaborate as this sounds, there really isn't much plot here, only a parade of arbitrary visual tricks to hold the film together.
  92. Man Push Cart
    Filmed in less than three weeks, Man Push Cart is an exemplary work of independent filmmaking carried out on a shoestring. Mr. Razvi’s convincing performance is a muted portrait of desolation bordering on despair.
  93. Tadpole
    Shot in just two weeks with a hand-held digital camera, the movie often looks frayed around the edges. Yet it has a soulful heart and a clear grasp of its rarefied milieu (Manhattan upper-level moneyed academia).
  94. Spy Kids
    An enjoyable and charming if overactive fantasy.
  95. Wonderland
    As well done as it is, Wonderland feels predictable. There is no sad turn in these characters' lives that you cannot see coming about an hour before.
  96. All the Real Girls
    Remarkable for its genuine, unpretentious lyricism.
  97. Time of the Wolf
    You can feel frightened and disturbed by this movie without being especially moved by it.
  98. Robinson in Ruins
    An exaltation of life counters the intimations of extinction, trumping the polemical despair.
  99. The Raid 2
    The pleasant surprise of Gareth Evans’s sturdy sequel to “The Raid: Redemption” is that neither its undercover drama nor its two-and-a-half-hour length bog down the bracing, and numerous, fight fests.
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